Mountain sickness and Employee Engagement

September 14, 2015

This is the part 2 of the blog post series on Employee Engagement [find part 1 here].

We have mountain sickness!

Imagine you are climbing a mountain which is about 2000m high. There are 4 camps set up as checkpoints to rest and get adjusted to the altitude. You think you don’t have the time to climb and decide to take a helicopter service to camp 4.

Your lungs have to deal with a change of 1500m altitude in very less time. But, you can’t stop. Already overloaded with the effort to adjust to the current change in altitude, you are walking up the mountain subjecting it to further change in altitude. Oxygen decreases. And finally, your lungs give away before you can reach the summit.

This condition is called Mountain Sickness.

Now, if at all you had started to climb the mountain by visiting each camp in its order of increasing altitude, here’s what would have happened:

You start at the base camp. While you are climbing up, the change is altitude in comparison with the ground level increases slowly and gradually. When you reach Camp 1, you stay there for a while giving your lungs enough time to get accustomed to the new altitude change. And then with these rest intervals and steady climbing, you would have reached the summit.

Replace yourself with the organization and your desire for it to grow. If your employees don’t have the basic necessities like knowing what is expected out of them at work or the tools that they require to work with, then there is no point in talking about the vision of the company or growth of the company and expecting your folks to take active part in it.

All you will end up with will be a set of confused and frustrated employees and the organization is said to have mountain sickness. It’s just a matter of time when your organization will fail.

Every employee has a need to feel engaged with the organization. This need to feel engaged can be visualized in the form of a pyramid called the Hierarchy Pyramid [Fig below].

One has to focus on engaging the employee at each and every level and in the same order of the a pyramid. The engagement has to start with the lowest level of basic needs and go all the way up to growth.

Coming back to the story of Multunus and mountain sickness. We realized that we had mountain sickness when we measured our employee engagement. The section below helped us understand how a set of 12 questions can give us feedback on health of employee engagement.

Measuring employee engagement

Gallup and team interviewed about 10 million employees and came up with these 12 questions to measure the engagement at the workplace. These questions capture the most important information by measuring the core elements that are needed to attract, focus and keep the most talented employees.

GALLUP Q12

1. Do I know what’s expected out of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

3. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day?

4. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work?

5. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person?

6. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

7. Does my opinions matter, at work?

8. Does the mission or purpose of my organization make me feel my job is important?

9. Are my associates or fellow employees committed to doing quality work?

10. Do I have a best friend at work?

11. In the last six months, did someone at work has talked to me about my progress?

12. This last year, did I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

These questions belong to hierarchy pyramid. At each level of this pyramid, the employee needs to feel engaged. The figure below shows what the mindset of the employee at each level of the engagement [left of the pyramid]. 

Hierarchy Pyramid levels explained

Here’s how the 12 questions and the employee mindset match up to the levels of the pyramid ["I" stands for the employees]:

Base Camp: What do I get?

At this stage the employee is concerned about what he is getting. The questions that he needs to be answered are:

• What’s my pay going to be?

• How long am I going to work?

• Will I have an office, desk or a phone to work with?

To measure how well their basic needs have been met with, we can use these two questions:

1. Do I know what’s expected out of me at work?

2. Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right?

Camp 1: What do I give?

Here, their basic needs are already met, their perspective evolves to seeing what their contribution as an individual is and other people’s perception of it.

We need to ask them these questions to measure their level of engagement at the individual level:

1. At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? * [If they are doing well in your role]*

2. In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for doing good work? * [Do other people value your individual performance]*

3. Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seems to care about me as a person? * [Do people value as a person]*

4. Is there someone at work who encourages my development? * [Is someone interested in investing in your individual growth]*

Camp 2: Do I belong here?

The employee’s perspective has widened and they have asked some difficult questions about themselves and others by this tim**e like if they want to belong to a place where others also respect and have high standards of quality and expectations from themselves.

To measure the engagement of the employee at the team level, we need to ask the following questions:

1. Is there someone at work who encourages my development?

2. Does my opinions matter, at work?

3. Does the mission or purpose of my organization make me feel my job is important?

4. Are my associates or fellow employees committed to doing quality work?

5. Do I have a best friend at work?

Camp 3: How do we all grow?

This stage is pretty advanced where the employee is impatient for everyone to grow. They want to make things better and to innovate. They can be here only if they are engaged in each of the levels below. They can apply their ideas only if they know what is expected of them at work, how well their idea is going to be accepted or rejected by others.

Here are the two questions you ask to measure the level of engagement at growth level:

1. In the last six months, did someone at work has talked to me about my progress?

2. This last year, did I have had opportunities at work to learn and grow?

The Summit

If the employee is able to answer positively to all the above questions, then they have reached the summit. Their focus is clear and they have a sense of achievement.

Discovering Multunus has Mountain Sickness!

After understanding mountain sickness, we took a survey with these 12 questions which is popularly referred to as the eNPS survey and asked folks to rate it  with a range between 0 to 10 [0 being a strong "No" and 10 being a strong "Yes"].

We analyzed the data from the survey to discover that we had mountain sickness. We have higher scores for the level Growth and lower scores for everything below.

Initially, it was hard to believe. But, numbers aren't irrational as we humans are. The scores and the hierarchy pyramid helped us think more objectively.

I will talk more about the analysis in the next post. Please feel free to comment with thoughts and questions.